Justice News

Additional Charges And Defendants Named In Chiropractic Insurance Fraud Conspiracies

Chiropractors billed “no-fault” insurance policies for more than $20 million dollars

Acting United States Attorney Gregory G. Brooker today announced additional federal charges in alleged multi-million dollar health care fraud conspiracies. Following the indictments of 12 defendants in December 2016, a federal grand jury added four defendants and additional mail fraud and wire fraud charges in connection with parallel conspiracies that executed schemes to fraudulently bill insurance companies for millions of dollars.

Under the Minnesota No-Fault Automobile Insurance Act, auto insurance policies must include a personal injury protection provision (PIP). The PIP provision carries a minimum coverage amount of $40,000 for expenses resulting from injuries sustained in an automobile accident, $20,000 of which may be used for medical expenses.

According to the charging documents, at various times between at least 2010 and 2016, chiropractors PRESTON E. FORTHUN, ANGELA A. SCHULZ, HUY NGOC NGUYEN, ADAM J. BURKE, and other Doctors of Chiropractic, engaged in schemes with others to defraud automobile insurance companies. The schemes, which were nearly identical fraud schemes largely carried out independent of one another, involved the submission of fraudulent no-fault insurance claims. The chiropractors involved in the scheme would submit claims and receive reimbursements for chiropractic services that either were not medically necessary or were never rendered, but were instead designed to fraudulently maximize reimbursement from the patients’ automobile insurance companies.

According to the charging documents, in order to get more patients to come to chiropractic appointments for treatment they did not need, the chiropractors would make illegal payments to “runners,” who typically made upwards of $1,000 per automobile accident patient, in exchange for bringing the patient into the chiropractor’s office. Runners were often not paid, or paid only in part, until after the patient had attended a minimum threshold number of treatment sessions. In order to keep the patients coming back for medically unnecessary appointments, the runners often paid illegal kickbacks to the patients. In addition to the runners charged in the December 2016 indictments, MIMI DOAN, OKWUCHUKWU JIDEOFOR, QUINCY CHETTUPALLY and MUKHTAR HASSAN have been charged for their roles in the conspiracies.

According to the charging documents, some of the charged chiropractors would conceal the kickback payments in various ways. For example, FORTHUN wrote checks to runners and falsely described those checks on the memo lines as payments for services such as “transportation” or “marketing.” Defendant BURKE encouraged runners to form corporate entities such as LLCs with names that sounded like legitimate businesses to which BURKE made kickback payments. Defendant NGUYEN tried to conceal kickback payments by making checks out to “cash” for several thousand dollars. He often wrote multiple such checks each week, falsely characterizing them as having been for “chiropractic supplies” of “office supplies.”

This case is the result of an investigation conducted by the Minnesota Commerce Fraud Bureau and the FBI. Additional assistance was provided by the Minneapolis Police Department, Saint Paul Police Department, Minnesota State Patrol, and Homeland Security Investigations.

This case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys David M. Maria and John E. Kokkinen.